We have been focusing on highlighting the different search engine optimization ranking factors to help you build your brand. Link-building is one of Google’s crucial SEO-authorized ranking factors, which is worth focusing on. This builds the confidence and credibility of your website to rank higher on the search engine result page. However, what is Link building?
Constructive and enlightening websites are more likely to have more revisits and preferability, which helps Google understand your value. Apart from this, what helps Google know your worth is link building. Here’s everything you must know about it to leverage its benefits.
Table of Contents
What Is Link Building For SEO & It’s Importance?
Link building is the process of accumulating backlinks, aka inbound links from other websites. This is one of the significant SEO ranking factors. The more high-quality backlinks you generate, the higher your website ranks on the result page. Link-building is like a vote of confidence for Google and other major search engines, and each vote insinuates your website as credible, valuable, and constructive. Hence, the search engines prioritize your site over others. There are different link-building strategies you can execute to produce top-quality backlinks to improve the ranking. This includes content marketing, email outreach, broken links, unlinked brand mentions, and public relations.
How To Build Links For Your Website?
To build links for your website, you must take three major steps:
1. Request For Links
Websites with high-quality content are likely to get more backlinks. If you believe you have one, reach the website owner with a similar niche or relevant content using their contact details. You can ask them to add your page’s link to their blog content, guides, ebooks, visual assets, and case studies. As a beginner, you may face hard times finding potential, but using certain keyword tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, and Moz can help you have the list.
2. Attach Links
Besides competitors or other relevant sites, the only ones that can help you in accumulating inbound links are your different platforms. It may be your social media platforms, business directories, blog post comments, or Q&A sites like Quora. Truth be told, these backlinks are not something Google pays more attention to as you create them. However, even if these links won’t actively help, they won’t hurt either. This technique promotes your site to people who couldn’t reach your site yet.
3. Generate Links Naturally
Generating links naturally means earning them from other websites without asking them to. The only way to do that is by creating high-quality, valuable content. Natural link-building is when the site attaches your page link to its content as a relevant resource. Here is the list of the different content types that help produce superior inbound links.
- Visual assets, for instance, infographics, charts, diagrams, etc.
- Authentic research and data
- Guides, articles, and tutorials
- Online tools and calculators
You can use the competitor’s site to bring excellence to your content, generating premium link-building.
Best Link-Building Strategies
We have covered four latest ways of building high-profile backlinks. Look at them and take inspiration for your marketing strategies!
1. Convert Competitor’s Backlinks
If there are credible domains that link to your competitors, then chances are that they will link to you, too.
Here are ways to reach out to them!
- Log into the Ahrefs dashboard and find “Site Explorer.”
- Enter the competitor’s domain URL and click on the “Backlinks” tab to check their backlink profile.
- You can then export data into an Excel document and analyze all the referring domains based on metrics such as – Domain Rate and Number of Backlinks.
2. Target High-Authority Niche Websites
This strategy entails finding websites that are of high value and credibility, and plan an outreach campaigns for them!
- Log into Ahrefs dashboard and navigate to the “Keyword Explorer.”
- Search for a keyword specific to your niche and industry trend, and you’ll get the list of top-ranking websites for that keyword.
- Manually scan the pages and see if there’s a scope for you to link to your pages contextually.
3. High-value Pages For Natural Backlinks
By this, we mean creating valuable pages that people can’t ignore. Instead of spending money on promotional backlinks, provide high-value content that can naturally attract backlinks.
- You can Host an industry-wide survey.
- Your company can publish white papers, case studies, and PDFs.
- You can explore How to’s, tutorials, news, and infographics.
- You can also publish Useful Resources, such as quizzes, calculators, heat maps, and image/text-enhancing tools.
4. Promotion
In this section we shall cover tips to promote your pages in a way such that it attracts backlinks!
- Share on your own social media
- Ask social media influencers to promote your pages to their followers.
- Use digital ads and include your desired page as the landing page.
- Volunteer to promote on other’s company’s website and add a link to your page.
- Reach out to online publications for PR and backlinking.
Conclusion
Link building improves your website’s credibility power and brings it to the forefront. Now that you understand what link building is and how to build it, ensure that your site is attached to credible pages. Link-building only works in your favor when you have generated it from organic websites. You can use different tools available online, like Ahrefs, to understand if your site is linked to trustworthy sites.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q.1 What are some common link-building mistakes to avoid?
Here are common link-building mistakes to avoid!
- You can’t focus on only quantity or quality, as both matter to a certain degree.
- You should avoid getting backlinks from websites in a completely foreign language to your website visitors.
- Never get backlinks from PBNs (private blog networks).
- Always disavow backlinks from spammy websites that either have extremely thin content, irrelevant content, or way too many pop-ups.
Q.2 How often should I update my link-building strategy?
You should consider updating your strategies if any of the following events take place:
- If you decide to migrate the website.
- Or if your competitors are earning more quality backlinks.
- Or if Google updates its algorithms.
Q.3 How does link-building impact domain authority?
Link building can increase your website’s domain authority, making it more credible from the perspective of users, competitors, and Google crawl bots. This credibility elevates your website ranking and attracts a lot of natural backlinks!
Q.4 How do I use competitor analysis for link-building?
Here’s how you can evaluate competitors to increase your chances of getting backlinks:
- See which pages are linking to your competitors and reach out to them.
- Understand how your competitors stand out in terms of content and upgrade your pages accordingly.
- See if there are content gaps that you can cover in order to out-rank them!